Bobbing for Apples

Samhain, a precursor to our All Hallows' Eve or Halloween celebration,
occurred at a time that was a magical for the Celts of Britain. A time when the veil
separating the worlds of the living and dead was its thinnest. A time
when the distinction between past, present, and future would blur. Many
of the earliest Halloween games took advantage of this belief and were
based on divining the future.

When the Romans conquered Britain they brought with them the apple
tree. The apple was representative of the goddess Pomona, the goddess of
fruit trees. She was known for her great beauty and fertility. Romans,
although conquerors, Romans were accepting of other cultures and soon
accepted Celtic beliefs and the Samhain festival. The two were blended
together and the apple became part of the harvest celebration that would
become Halloween.

Because Pomona was a fertility goddess and because the Celts believed
that the pentagram was a fertility symbol and when an apple is
sliced in half the seeds form a pentagram it is natural that they
believed the apple could be used to determine marriages during this
magical time of year. From this belief comes the game bobbing for
apples. During the annual celebration young unmarried people try to bite into an apple floating in water or hanging from a string.
The first person to bite into the apple would be
the next one to marry.

While the apple may or may not have had any ability to predict the
future it brought people together from distant farms and villages who
may otherwise have never had contact with others outside their own
families. This was very important as most people did not live through
their childhoods. Marriage and fertility were extremely important.
Without children there would be nobody to carry on your genes. If you
didn't have a large supply of children there wouldn't be enough labor to
survive. In this respect bobbing for apples wasn't just a game but a
matter of life or death.

Today bobbing for apples doesn't have the same importance as it once
did. It's a game now played for fun by the young and old alike. To learn
how to bob for apples see the Halloween games section
of Entertaining or click here.